West in a quandary as Russia opens new front in Ukraine 'hybrid warfare'

Washington: Ukraine just got uglier. What appears to be a Russian bid to open a second front, which would force the Kiev government to pull resources away from its siege of the last two separatist strongholds in the east of the country, seems calculated to provoke more rhetoric than action from the West.

There's a flurry of meetings – the UN Security Council went into emergency session on Thursday; North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and European officials promised a response by Friday and the Ukranian National Security and Defence Council was summoned as President Petro Poroshenko cancelled a trip to Turkey.

Lonely outpost: A pro-Russian rebel sits at his position in Savur-Mohyla, a hill east of the city of Donetsk. Photo: Reuters

Twenty-four hours after announcing that elections for the national parliament would be held in late October, Mr Poroshenko said: "Columns of heavy artillery, huge loads of arms and regular Russian servicemen came to the territory of Ukraine from Russia through the uncontrolled border area."

NATO now estimates that as many as 1000 Russian troops have moved up to 50 kilometres into Ukraine – and it has released images of what it says are Russian armoured vehicles and artillery crossing the border.

Little green men: Russia has supplied men and materiel to those fighting against Kiev's rule in eastern Ukraine. Photo: Reuters

Kiev reinstated national service as it poured military resources into the south-eastern city of Mariupol, which it believes Moscow sees as part of a land bridge from Russia to the Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in March.

The problem for Kiev is that for all its huffing and puffing, the West is not quite sure about how to respond.

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'Yes' is the response to tighter sanctions, but not to the point of counter-sanctions that could leave Europe without Russian gas this winter and especially as Russian President Vladimir Putin has already retaliated with his own global sanctions, much to the chagrin of Australian farmers.

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'Yes' again to military readiness, but only to the extent of prepositioning supplies and materiel elsewhere in the neighbourhood. And NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen seemed to assess the Putin challenge to be above his pay grade, telling reporters: "It will take more than NATO to counter such hybrid warfare effectively."

A map of the battle zones where Ukrainian troops are facing Russian and separatist forces. Photo: Supplied

And while there is a consensus that Moscow is manipulating the separatist rebels to its own geopolitical ends, US President Barack Obama wanted to split hairs when he spoke to reporters on Thursday – we were observing an "incursion", not an "invasion", the President said.

Similarly, there's a reluctance to call the conflict in which thousands have died a war. This collective hesitation in the capitals of the world might help to explain why Mr Putin believes he can get away with doing as he pleases in Ukraine. The point is made in a quote this week, attributed to a senior Polish official, who warned that Germany, Italy and Holland were so dependent on the Russian energy giant Gazprom that they were like "rabbits in the desert paralysed by the stare of the snake".

But in this, there is a built-in dilemma for the Russian leader – he is so deeply involved and is so obviously using the crisis as a proxy stoush with the US that he can't afford to be seen to lose by allowing the rebel separatists to lose.

Like a humanitarian convoy of more than 200 trucks he dispatched last week and for days played a will-he, won't-he game with before sending them into Ukraine, the tactical motive for opening a new front between the border and Mariupol is to distract Kiev's generals from what they call their "anti-terrorist operation", in which they have encircled and are pounding the rebel strongholds of Luhansk and Donetsk, and to force Kiev to peel away military resources for another fight.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who appears to have been appointed global pointsman on the Ukrainian crisis, sent mixed signals - "we made it clear in March this year that if there were a further escalation, more sanctions would have to be discussed" - but also: "A military solution is not what we think is the appropriate approach."

What's in a map: The map at the top was tweeted by the Canadian Joint Delegation to NATO on Wednesday, August 27. On Thursday the map below was tweeted by Russia's permanent mission to NATO. But can the West move beyond tweets in responding to Moscow's facts on the ground? Photo: AP

"We have seen artillery firing across the border and also inside Ukraine. We have seen a Russian military build-up along the border ... you see a sophisticated combination of traditional conventional warfare mixed up with information and primarily disinformation operations."

The conflict has assumed its own macabre Inspector Clouseau dimension – Mr Putin long denied that the so-called "little green men" crawling all over the Crimea before he annexed it in March had anything to do with Russia, only to admit later that "of course" they were Russians. Absurdly, we were told by Moscow this week that Russian troops arrested in Ukraine had wandered over the border "by accident" and now Russian journalists attempting to report on the burial of Russian servicemen killed in combat in Ukraine are being warned off.

At the same time, Mr Poroshenko seemed to channel his inner Peter Sellers when he told reporters: "The situation is certainly extremely difficult and nobody is going to simplify it ... still it is controlled enough for us to refrain from panic."

Moscow persists with its denials of Russian boots on the ground. But apart from media and intelligence reports on military hardware crossing the border, the new prime minister for the so-called Donetsk People's Republic, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, told a Russian TV interviewer that as many as 3000 or 4000 Russians, many of them active servicemen, had indeed fought with the rebels.

In any event, Moscow's denials became meaningless when Kiev published video of its Russian captives, just as Mr Putin and Mr Poroshenko were about to meet on Tuesday.

Similarly, despite Moscow's denials that it is arming the rebels, its claims that separatist forces are using weapons commandeered from the Ukrainian national army looked hollow this week as defence analysts argued that some of the vehicles detected in rebel armed columns in Ukraine could only have come from Russia because Moscow is not known to have exported them and they are too recent a model to have been left behind at the time of Ukrainian independence.

The "rabbit and snake" putdown of European capitals appeared in an opinion piece by Charles Crawford, formerly a British ambassador to Sarajevo, whose input is instructive because Moscow often quotes the Western intervention in Bosnia to justify its interest in the "plight" of Russians and Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine.

Reading Moscow minds, Mr Crawford senses that Mr Putin's objective is the "Bosnia-isation" of Ukraine, by which he means that Ukraine loses the already annexed Crimea, an outcome in which Moscow wins all, but under the pretense that all issues remain on the table.

Mr Crawford writes: "Otherwise, Ukraine's territorial integrity is preserved on paper, but some eastern areas of Ukraine have something like the extensive autonomy given to Republika Srpska, the 'Serbian' entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina.

"These areas then could be merged into Russia's economic and political space as Moscow decides, but through them the Kremlin also would enjoy an effective veto on strategic choices made in Kiev – Ukraine in practice ends up 'independent of blocs' [ie. unable to join NATO or to move too close to the European Union], while in theory such options are not closed off."

Mr Crawford worries that viewed pragmatically, such an outcome might be the best available – it would get European business back on track "and while the Middle East blows up, do we really have time to care about impenetrable Slav-on-Slav rivalry anyway?"